Apple's lobbying effort not yet ripe

Apple is taking a bruising in Washington, and insiders say there’s a reason: It’s the one place in the world where the company hasn’t built its brand.

In the first three months of this year, Google and Microsoft spent a little more than $7 million on lobbying and related federal activities combined. Apple spent $500,000 — even less than it spent the year before.

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The company’s attitude toward D.C. — described by critics as “don’t bother us” — has left it without many inside-the-Beltway friends. And that means Apple is mostly on its own when the Justice Department goes after it on e-books, when members of Congress attack it over its overseas tax avoidance or when an alphabet soup of regulators examine its business practices.

“I never once had a meeting with anybody representing Apple,” said Jeff Miller, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee for eight years. “There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part that strategy did not benefit them.”

Apple could have learned a lesson from Wal-Mart and Microsoft, corporate giants who established major Washington operations only after the government came gunning for them. And with a target now on its back, Google is on pace to pump $20 million into lobbying this year.

But Apple seems intent on carving its own path.

Unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Apple has no political action committee. And while Google and Microsoft have aggressive news media operations in Washington, Apple doesn’t. That standoffish approach to D.C. may have worked fine in the Steve Jobs era, but the charismatic leader’s death last year left Apple without its reality distortion field.

The company declined to comment on any aspect of this story.

Apple’s defenders say it prefers to work more subtly behind the scenes and that it has moved the needle on some legislative issues.

“Yes, it is true that they don’t use the old Washington playbook,” said one source familiar with the company’s D.C. operations. “They don’t have a massive table of consultants and law firms. It is more low-key, but it is also respectful.”

Apple just hired Walt Kuhn, a former aide to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on the Judiciary Committee, adding a fourth member to its in-house lobbying shop. The company has built a small team of elite contract lobbyists on both sides of the aisle. And it has been briefing policymakers on its view of the e-books case, both in Washington and at the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

“They want to do this in a measured, respectful way,” the source said. “It wouldn’t take much to hit the tripwire” to launch the narrative that “Apple has problems and is trying to buy the town.”

But several other sources told POLITICO that the company is recalcitrant — when it’s visible at all — and that its hostility may have brought extra attention.